Tuesday, January 10, 2012

"That Jews stink," on early modern rational inquiry.

One of more interesting books in the development of, well, human thought, is Sir Thomas Browne's "Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very many Received Tenents and commonly presumed Truths," first published in 1646. The book attemps to dispel many myths through making sense out of empirical observation, reason and what is written in books.

The book touches on topics such as

That crystal is nothing else but ice strongly congealed

That porcellane of China dishes lie under the earth an hundred years in preparation

That the root of Mandrakes resembles the shape of a man

That an elephant hath no joints

That a beaver, to escape the hunter, bites off his testicles or stones

Of the pissing of Toads

Of the basilisk

That a salamander lives in the fire

That men weigh heavier dead han alive, and before meat than after

On saluting upon sneezing

Of the picture of Adam and Eve with navels

Of the picture of our Saviour with long hair

Of the picture of Moses with horns

and many more besides, on magnets, electricity, all sorts of animals, real or imagined.

Below is his treatment of the belief That Jews stink:

In the 1835 reprint, in the Collected Works, some notes by other authors are included. Here is the note on the Jews stink question:

4 That Jews stink.] The Jews anxiously observing the prohibited eating of blood keepe their flesh covered with onyons and garleek till itt putrifie,[1] and contracte as bad a smell as that of rottenes from those strong sawoes ; and soe by continual use thereof emit a loathsom savour, as Mr. Fulham experimented in Italye at a Jewish meeting, with the hazard of life, till he removed into the fresh air. Teste ipso fide dignissimo.— Wr.

Howell, in a letter written to Lord Clifford, in reply to his enquiries respecting the Jews, does not hesitate to adopt the common opinion as one so well known as to need no proof. "As they are," says he, " the most contemptible people, and have a kind of fulsome scent, no better than a stink, that distinguisheth them from others, so they are the most timorous people on earth, &c"—Familiar Letters, book i. § 6, letter xv. p. 252.

Here's Sir Thomas resting in peace:

[1] See Maria Diemling, “'As the Jews Like to Eat Garlick': Garlic in Christian- Jewish Polemical Discourse in Early Modern Germany,” in ed. Greenspoon, Food and Judaism, 215–34.

English is a lot more stable and formalized than it was 400 years ago. Right or wrong, it was mostly an oral language back then, and people didn't have dictionaries or lexicons to tell them how words had to be spelled. The point was to convey meaning or, often, pronunciation. We can see such experiments in later developments when people would often drop an unpronounced e and replace it with an apostrophe.